Data rate adaptation strategy to avoid packet loss in MANETs

Abstract

Due to mobile and dynamic nature of MANETs, congestion avoidance and control is a challenging issue. Congestion mainly occurs due to the phenomena where data arrival rate is higher than the transmission rate of data packets at a particular node. Congestion results in high packet drop ratio, increased delays and wastage of network resources. In this paper, we propose data rate adaptation technique to avoid packet loss. Proposed technique is based on the analysis of queue length of the forwarding nodes, number of source nodes forwarding data through a particular forwarding node, and rate of link changes. In the proposed strategy, queue length of forwarding nodes is communicated periodically to the neighbor nodes. Keeping in view the queue length of forwarding node, the sending node adapts its sending data rate to avoid congestion and to ensure reliable data communication. Results show that proposed strategy improves network performance as compared to the static data rate adaptation strategy in terms of packet delivery ratio upto 15% and reduces packet loss due to interface queue overflow upto 14%, respectively.